Quentin Tarantino interview

CraveOnline: It wouldn’t seem like you and Robert Rodriguez are the same kinds of filmmakers, yet you collaborate so well.

Quentin Tarantino: Well, it’s actually funny.  Somebody was asking us, “Why are you guys such good friends?  Is it because you’re both filmmakers?  Is it because you both came up at the same time together?”  And well, yeah, naturally.  However, having said that, if we had never made a movie in our lives and we just met each other, we would be these friends.  If I worked at Video Archives and Robert was a customer, we’d be great buddies.  If we had met each other in elementary school…. I wish I knew a guy like Robert in elementary school. We’d be buddies too so the fact that we’re both artists and we both respect each other’s art form, that’s amazing and I’ve always dreamed about the community of artists kind of thing.

CraveOnline: How did you decide whose film would go first?

Quentin Tarantino: We never really thought that much about it.  It just seemed like the natural way to go and I wouldn’t think to put it under the microscope to wonder why that was the case but I think it’s probably because Robert’s was a little lighter.  There’s a more humorous vein to it.

CraveOnline: Being such a fan of these old movies, was it nice to finally get away with having bad continuity problems in the film?

Quentin Tarantino: That was one of the kind of fun things of trying to get into this vibe of filmmaking, was we just found that we got tickled. On any other movie, what would drive us crazy, we got kind of tickled when it happened on this movie. If the cameraman bumped into the wall as he was going back and the camera had a little jiggle, we liked that. If the focus puller buzzed on somebody as opposed to getting it sharp and they had to find the focus, it took them a second to get there, we end up loving that in the editing room. “Oh, that's the sh*t.”

CraveOnline: How about turning the tables where in your film, the girls actually become more badass than Kurt Russell?

Quentin Tarantino: It's actually not foreign to the genres that we're dealing with. These type of B movies and especially if you go to the kung fu movies of the '70s in Hong Kong or even in Japan, the female avenger has always been a staple there. Those were the movies that allowed women to do that. Not the Hollywood movies. But even my film is using the slasher film structure and that is the third act of every slasher film is the final girl going on and vanquishing the boogey man because she is the one with the moral fortitude that can wipe them out.

CraveOnline: How do you pick your genres. Do you think, “Boy, there hasn't been a woman in bondage film in a while?”

Quentin Tarantino: It's funny, to say that I think in terms of genre would be an understatement. I think in terms of subgenre. To put a point on that, everyone's calling Robert's movie a zombie movie. Actually, it's a subgenre inside the zombie movie which is the infected people movie which is not quite a zombie movie but definitely would be on the same shelf.

CraveOnline: When will you get to Inglorious Bastards or The Vega Brothers?

Quentin Tarantino: I don't know about the Vega brothers. I might someday write that as a paperback because I think the actors, we've all gotten a little older since then. But I could do it as a paperback any time I wanted. Inglorious Bastards should probably be the very next thing I end up doing.

CraveOnline: You do film festivals and distribution labels. What's the next level of getting people to rediscover lost gems?

Quentin Tarantino: Actually, it seems to me when I go to the DVD stores and everything, I have never seen more of these titles that I've always heard about but never had a chance to see ever available before. All the old Italian [films] are just coming out and normally when we saw them in America they might have had 15 or 10 or 20 minutes cut out and now we're seeing the full versions. Maybe they're not always quite as good in the full version. The exploitation distributor in America knew they were right to cut those moments out. What I think the next step would be which I would love is through Grindhouse, what I'd like to do is when we start doing Grindhouse DVD kind of things is one of the Grindhouse labels could very well be just actual double features of these old cool exploitation movies from the late '60s early '70s, again with the same format, the trailers in the front all picked by me, all arranged by me not trying to act as commercials but just an aesthetic, or we could do the same thing we did with Grindhouse with legitimately old real '70s films on DVD and create that whole little movie experience where you press play and woosh, all in a box.

CraveOnline: Did you just say there are some movies you haven't seen?

Quentin Tarantino: There's a couple, there's a few, there's a few. Like four.

CraveOnline: When you get people to discover these old low budget movies, some people love them and others say, “What are you thinking?" How do you account for that?

Quentin Tarantino: Well, you know, different strokes for different folks, whatever. The thing about it that is really cool is the fact that yeah, people say, "Do you think younger people who have never experienced this before are going to get it?" Well, you don't have to get it. If you have to get it, then it doesn't almost work. You've got to be able to just sit down and enjoy it. We actually think that if you've never seen any of this stuff before then it's going to make this all the more original. You're going to like it all the more because it truly is something new. But what is nice and it definitely happened with Robert and his El Mariachi movies as far as their connection with spaghetti westerns and my Kill Bill movies in connection to the kung fu movies, is fans might discover them through us and then they want to see more. We have the titles and we explain them. They get to go on and educate themselves.

CraveOnline: Speaking of which, when will we get the complete Kill Bill cut?

Quentin Tarantino: Actually, it's all done. It's ready to go but we're just working Grindhouse now so Kill Bill from beginning to end will probably be released sometime in the course of this year.

CraveOnline: How did you choose directors to do the fake trailers?

Quentin Tarantino: That ended up happening whereas Robert, the first thing done on the movie was Machete and I had it in my house so Edgar Wright and Eli Roth are both friends of ours and they were at my house and they were like, “Hey, let me show Machete. It’s so cool.” And then it just seemed like, because they really got what we were trying to do and they were as knowledgeable about this cinema as we are and it just seemed like a perfect fit, to have them come aboard and Rob Zombie came aboard because of Bob Weinstein.  I know Rob, he’s a nice guy but we don’t hang out or anything and we hadn’t had a chance to meet each other that much and Bob Weinstein brought it up to him because he was doing Halloween with Dimension and I thought, “Oh wow, that’s a really good idea” and then when he came up with the Werewolf Women of the SS, that’s kind of like a Jess Franco sleaziness that really wasn’t in the other movies, but oh my God that’s really important!  That is a vein we hadn’t hit on in any of the other ones.  We need to go in that direction!

CraveOnline: And those old trailers really were that graphic.

Quentin Tarantino: Yeah, can you believe that they could get away with stuff like that in trailers? I couldn't believe it. I'm friends with Rick Linklater, we both are, and when he was doing Bad News Bears, he goes, “Hey, why don't you bring some movies over and we'll show it to the Bears. It'll be a really fun weekend.” So I brought some cool Jerry Lewis movies and I put together some trailers. I put on the trailer to the original Bad News Bears. There was stuff in that trailer that Rick couldn't put in his MOVIE.

CraveOnline: Would you like to keep doing these Grindhouse movies if this is a success?

Quentin Tarantino:  Yeah. One of the things I loved about it, it gave me an opportunity for me to say, let’s do an blaxploitation movie, do a spaghetti western, do something like that where the weight of the world isn’t riding on it, I don’t have to reinvent cinema in order to do it.  I can just do it.

CraveOnline: At this point, isn’t it also a safe bet that your audience will go for these kinds of movies?

Quentin Tarantino: What?  I wish this was a safe, sure bet!  It seems fairly risky to me but you know the answer to that question, this is what we like.  We’ve been talking for 16 years now.  We’re doing a movie we like. We’re actually just hoping there’s enough people like us.

CraveOnline: Were the old Grindhouse movies more about the directors than the stars too?

Quentin Tarantino: Pam Grier was a huge star, in that genre. But that’s one of the really interesting things I thought growing up was reading a magazine like Fangoria, it was all about the directors.  It also might be about the makeup guys or something but if ever there was an auteur magazine in America it was Fangoria because it is all about “Here’s the director.”

CraveOnline: What was the first Grindhosue movie you ever saw?

Quentin Tarantino: That’s a good question.  What would legitimately that you could absolutely called a Grindhouse movie, my grandmother took me to the Garmar theatre in Montebello and there was a film that I wanted to see because it was always on TV was the Doberman Gang and she took me to see it and it was on a double feature with Eddie Romero’s Filipino horror film, The Twilight People which was like a Filipino version of The Island of Dr Moreau.  And Pam Grier was in it playing the Panther Girl, and my grandmother took me to see it!